


The Moon at Perigee

by kenaz



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Challenge Response, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-07
Updated: 2006-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-05 22:45:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenaz/pseuds/kenaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the moon is at perigee, it has reached the point in its orbit closest to its center of attraction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Moon at Perigee

**Author's Note:**

  * For [j_folked](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=j_folked).



Lupin's hands were broad, the fingers strong and square. On the middle finger of his right hand, a callus blossomed above the knuckle, a souvenir of years of gripping quills as if they might fly out of his hand. Often, a sooty residue of ink sat deep in the fissures where he had hastily nudged a word that had not yet set. The backs of his hands were dusted with a down of vaguely brown hairs that bore little resemblance to fur. They were not scarred. Odd, that; the instruments of his own debasement kept their bloody work hidden beneath threadbare robes and jumpers with moth-eaten elbows.

Snape did not need to open his eyes to know that the warmth brushing against him was the long and slightly ink-stained edge of Lupin's hand. He did not need to open his eyes to imagine the line of demarcation where the pale, tender flesh of palm became the thinner, hair-strewn hide.

Lupin hedged, edged closer, but the ephemeral pressure of his hand touching-but-not was a question he knew Snape would not answer. Could not answer. It was the spectre that haunted the outskirts of their conversations, their ambling discourses on Charms and Potions and Defense of Dark Arts. The occasional lapses had long since ceased to feel awkward, and Snape knew Lupin wasn’t really reading the book that lay open on the table in front of him; he was only waiting for the right moment to steer their conversation toward more intimate climes so he might draw Snape away into bed, their polite banter casting a glamour of affinity over what might have been simply two solitary men exorcising loneliness, and Snape hoped the act would be enough to stretch the silence left by the unanswered question just a little longer.

Snape thought about Lupin's mouth often: lips full and slightly chapped; incisors that were absurdly blunt, considering. He thought about kissing Lupin and his mind seized, though he could not say whether it seized because such thoughts had emerged for Lupin, or if it seized simply because such thoughts had emerged at all. He was not a man given to saccharine musings, but attempts to stave off visions of that mouth served only to push them to the fore of his mind. Lupin's mouth was hot and wet on his, on him, and when they touched they moved quickly, though Snape didn't dare consider whether they rushed out of habit or out of desire or out of desperation.

Lupin's hands were broad, and they trembled when he lifted the bottle of Wolfsbane Potion to his lips that night. Snape knew because he had stayed to watch.

  
~ )0(~

Lupin’s hair was an unremarkable, mousey hue shot through with grey, though it was less a true grey than simply an absence of color, as if the pigment had finally seen the futility of climbing up the roots.

His body illustrated a tale told anew each month, with some slight variations, shifting with him as he moved. The oldest scars shined as if slivers of the moon had been embedded in his skin to remind him (as if he could forget) what he was; newcomers were livid red or pink or purple. Snape saw the shapes of sigils in the scars and scried for their meaning, but all they revealed was cruel, purposeless pain.

The rangy frame in repose spoke of sleepless nights, years of poverty and poor nutrition, and the toll extracted each month in blood. Snape knew the scent, strong and slightly musty, of the pelt crawling idly over Lupin's chest in another shade of indifferent brown. It darkened as it crept over his stomach and wandered down, down. He knew the salty-stale taste of Lupin’s skin, and the way it gave beneath his lips, quivered beneath his tongue. He could conjure the feeling of Lupin’s cock in his hand without touching it; his fingers had memorized the breadth of his erection just as his eyes had memorized how it looked each second as it rose from slumber to tumescence.

Lupin’s legs were sturdier and more powerful than Snape’s, though just as pale, as if they retained the strength of the wolf. If he were the sort of man given to idle touching-- and he wasn't-- he imagined he would, at every opportunity, visit the small bald patches at the top of Lupin's thighs. Decades of trousers and their attendant friction had depilated the hair, buffed the skin perfectly smooth, like beach glass. There were no scars there, no vicious reminders of an unnatural nature, nothing to mar the tiny vista of pure flesh; a man distilled to his most pristine element.

Snape clenched his jaw and turned away from brown eyes, spaniel-soft and too knowing. He hastily stood and dressed, pressing his lips in a dyspeptic line when Lupin's mouth began its subtle ascent into a smile. He was angry that he had been caught staring. They did not _stare_ at each other like simpering schoolgirls. They were men, not young ones, either, and that was not what they did, damn it. It made him feel foolish, and feeling foolish made his temper vile. He glared in silence as he fastened his buttons all the way up to his chin, safe now in slightly sour-smelling wool, invisible in black worsted. He turned crisply on his heel and didn't even say good night, feeling vindicated when he glimpsed Lupin's spaniel eyes: confusion, disappointment, hurt, all quickly shuttered behind a maddeningly bland smile. By the time he had shut the door too loudly behind him, the victory felt hollow.

Once in his own bed, he could not sleep.

)0(

Each month, he brewed a new batch of Wolfsbane Potion. It was complicated and required both his skill and his attention: The fluxweed had to be picked under a full moon, the moonstone ground to a fine powder, the syrup of hellebore had to be stirred in just before the potion broke into a boil, the valerian added in three portions after. Aconite and belladonna could kill a man; opium and wormwood were addictive.

But for all that, it was manageable for a Potions Master. At first, he railed about its complexity because he had no intention of being saddled with the wellbeing of a werewolf, of being shackled to someone else's weakness. Then he railed because he had learned long ago that the more vocally he complained, the wider berth he was given, and he wanted to be left in peace to do his work.

Now he jealously guarded his charge because it was something he alone could do for Lupin, and he'd be damned if he'd allow anyone to usurp him in it.

He added the opium tincture drop by drop. Eventually, Lupin would develop a dependence on the potion, and not only for its effects on his transformations. Lupin seemed to think this an acceptable price to pay for retaining a human psyche each month; Snape was not as certain. He loathed the idea of needing anything with that sort of physical desperation. He drank no more than an occasional glass of Madeira or perhaps a snifter of brandy deep into winter: he had too many memories of his father wrapping his fingers tight around the neck of a gin bottle and tighter, later, around his mother's neck, snarling and cursing unintelligibly until she passed out or he did. He feared addiction, despised it, because he knew what it did. But he had as little choice in the matter now as then.

He stirred the potion without looking, muscle memory guiding his hands while his thoughts swirled elsewhere, and it occurred to him that it was too late, and all his temperance had been just one more useless exercise in self-denial: On the days he didn't see Lupin, he thought about him. If he went too long without touching him, his fingers itched at the paucity of flesh beneath them. He took himself in hand thinking of diffident brown hair and warm, scarred skin and a mouth that tasted like old coffee, slightly sour milk, and cheap chocolate, and he ached.

He was already lost.

)0(

  
He had been discoursing on some arcane branch of Dark Arts, pretending to ignore the way Remus was touching him, not in the fervid and demanding way he did when they mindlessly grappled for release, but softly, lazily, the pads of his fingers tracing concentric circles on his chest, when the momentary veil of banality lifted and he remembered to whom he was speaking. Who knew more about Dark Arts than one whose body rebelled against him every month? One whose blood carried the taint of evil and an ancient animal grudge?

He looked at Lupin but saw the wolf: knowing, hungry, and strong.

He remembered, all too viscerally, the damp and weedy smell of the tunnel and being rooted to the spot in helpless terror. He remembered the acrid tang of piss running hotly down his leg, remembered the snarl of inhuman hunger, the snap of ravenous jaws, and the soulless black eyes that had looked at him beneath the Whomping Willow and seen only meat.

Those same eyes now were warm and brown and watching him with something like hope in their quiescent depths, and he could not reconcile the feral scent of decay, the reek of rage, with this gentleman-- this gentle _man_\-- who looked at him with quiet eyes and touched him reverently and with desire not only for the pull of flesh and the snaking heat of their bodies moving roughly together, but for the hushed and vagrant conversation afterward. He could not reconcile murderous hunger with this man who loved him.

Whom he loved. Oh, God… whom he loved.

He could not reconcile this.

His fear disgusted him. It was a weakness and he disdained weakness; he had too many of them already, but this… this was the one that would kill him. Not the Dark Lord or any of his sycophants, not Sirius Black, not Harry Potter: Remus Lupin.

He resisted the urge to flee. Lupin's colorless brow rucked in concern. He said nothing except "Severus," and that single word contained everything: a question, an affirmation, and a thousand other words that Snape could not stand to hear. Not then. Not yet. He raised his hand and turned his face away, forestalling further discussion.

"I am fine," he said. "It is nothing."

But it wasn't. It was everything.

  
)0(

  
Severus woke before dawn to a pang that reached down deep below the skin, a hurt that sang in his blood and pulled cruelly at the marrow of his bones; he woke to his own full moon, his own vicious transformation.

Remus lay sleeping beside him, their sinewy legs tangled, a pale and long-toed foot breaching the tight tether of the sheets at the end of the bed. He had not fled, had not hurriedly dressed and excused himself with evasive words. For reasons he dared not fathom, he had stayed. He could not remember the last time he had not woken alone.

His robes lay across the room, conscientiously folded and draped over the back of a wing chair with carved arms, and he calculated how quickly he could extricate himself and snatch them up, how quickly he could escape back to the solitude of his dungeon. But he made no move to leave. Instead, he tentatively stretched his arm around the slumbering form and forced himself to lie still and to take slow, shallow breaths while staring at the small mole between Remus' shoulder blades. He credited it a minor miracle that he did not reflexively startle when Remus' fingers twined with his own.

He closed his eyes once more, and slept, and did not dream.

  
)0(

  
The rank musk of fur battled with the pungency of fear. Snape's eyes were still fright-wide and gritty; he had not slept. He had been in the wing chair, back erect, hands gnarling white around arms carved like lion's claws, since sunset the night before. He quietly considered the irony of a Slytherin in a Gryffindor's chair, calling upon Gryffindor courage to maintain his sanity through the longest night of his life.

He had seen the man become the beast and seen the beast pacing in tight circles. The eyes that had looked out at him from the hideously elongated snout had not been the same soulless black orbs he had stared down in the dank tunnel beneath the cantankerous tree, but neither had they been the warm, brown eyes of Remus Lupin. They had been something in-between: sentient, intelligent, but not entirely tame.

He had foolishly assumed that the reversion of wolf back to man would be a slow recession, a mild return. But it wasn't. It was every bit as brutal and violent as the change from man to wolf : bones broke and reformed; coarse hairs fell away revealing skin stretched taut to the point of tearing. Cries of half-human agony proved no less chilling than the baying of the emerging wolf. And when it was over, Lupin was left naked and ravaged on the cold stone floor, limbs twitching, a thin trickle of blood running from his nose and bruises blossoming across his pasty skin, the legacy of every cell in his body being ripped apart and pushed back together one night in every thirty.

Snape slipped from the chair and crawled across the floor on his hands and knees and he trembled when he reached out to touch Lupin's clammy cheek.

"Severus" is all Lupin whispered. That word, like his curious eyes and his hand touching-but-not, contained everything, but above all else, a question. And this time, Snape found he could answer.

"I am here, Remus."

The words did not taste bitter and they did not scrape his throat raw or rend his lips as he had expected.

"I am here."

They unfurled within him, like wings.

~ ~ )0( ~ ~

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: This was originally written for for the challenge, and appears in a slightly different form [ HERE](http://community.livejournal.com/hpslashnotsmut/14388.html). In the lag time between submitting the work and the work being revealed, I decided it required another revision, so I will consider this version to be the "official" version.


End file.
